Hangout Festival gets 5-year renewal, with conditions

View full size(Press-Register/John David Mercer)Crowds pack in to listen to the Black Crowes performs on the Hangout Stage during the first day of the Hangout Music Festival Friday May 14, 2010 in Gulf Shores, Ala. (Press-Register, John David Mercer)

GULF SHORES, Ala. — Organizers of the three-day Hangout Beach Music and Arts Festival received the go-ahead Monday evening to plan on having shows at the city’s public beach for the next five years.

The five-year special events permit, which will allow daily attendance of as many as 35,000 on either the second or third weekend of each May, comes with conditions, though.

Mayor Robert Craft said that besides ensuring proper measures are made by organizers to uphold certain standards of security and sanitation, they must also ensure “that the theme of the production is consistent with the family-oriented nature of Gulf Shores public beaches.”

Craft said City Hall isn’t going to be in the business of screening the lineup each spring, but it’s been made clear to organizers that the city doesn’t want any artists that use excessive profanity or draw unusually rowdy crowds.

“If we have one bad year, we can pull the plug,” the mayor said. “It just gives us some way to give him something that he can market and gives us the control that we really want to have.”

Chief organizer Shaul Zislin, a real estate developer and owner of the 18,000-square-foot Hangout restaurant and Gulf-front entertainment complex, told city officials that a five-year commitment would help him in negotiations with musicians and talent brokers. On Monday he said the contingencies placed on the permits wouldn’t be an issue.

“If it’s not good for the city, it’s not good for us,” said Zislin, who underwrote the inaugural festival that featured Trey Anastasio, the Roots and the Zac Brown Band among its headliners. “We’re not going to do something that is not beneficial to the city.”

Zislin, who also owns the chain of Surf Style beach shops and helped put on this summer’s Gulf-front Jimmy Buffett concert, said his team is already planning May’s festival.

When he first pitched a three-day music festival on the beach late last year, Zislin said his aim was to draw visitors to town during a traditionally slow stretch between spring break and Memorial Day and introduce new people to Alabama’s beaches.

The importance of that mission has only increased as coastal Alabama continues to recover from this summer’s oil spill, said Mike Foster, vice president of marketing for Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Tourism.

“We’re convinced that the key to getting people down here and restoring things to what we were a couple of years ago,” Foster said, “is to get people down here and to show them that we’re OK, knowing that they will go home and tell everyone that they know what a great time they had.”